Grand Theft Auto Vdeserves accolades for its innovative
triumvirate of antiheroes, its many and varied missions, and the
sprawling depiction of Los Santos and the hillbilly outbacks. But to rip
off what an erudite author once said about Oakland, there is no "there"
there. I can't imagine any scenario in which a literary icon like
Gertrude Stein would be critiquing a video game, but that legendary
putdown can also apply to the Greater Los Santos Area. There is
something missing in GTAV that makes the game less engaging than the
sociopathic sandboxes of GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas, the two
GTA games that will perpetually be my measuring sticks for the
franchise.
What is missing most of all is a solid sense
of place. Both Vice City and San Andreas reveled in nostalgia. Vice City
reeked of the '80s, from the pitch-perfect radio stations to the
Crockett and Tubbs lookalikes that showed up in their Testarossas--er,
Cheetahs--when you cranked your wanted level to three stars.
San Andreas
evoked the early 1990s in a similar way. San Andreas' theme was not as
developed as Vice City's, but the game still depicted a recognizable
time and place in its grim cartoon look at Los Angeles--with sidelong
glances at LA County, San Francisco, and Las Vegas--during the explosion
of rap and the racial tension that saw a good chunk of SoCal go up in
flames after the Rodney King verdict.
Both San Andreas and Vice City seemed like real places.
Rockstar's biggest achievement in these games was in creating places
that you wanted to visit. Vice City was most successful at this. I
practically moved to Vice City; I knew the streets by name and could
find my way around there better than in the real world. This devotion
speaks to Vice City's power to invade my waking thoughts. Long after the
game's release, I would go for long drives around town, listening to
the radio and indulging my inner hooligan in a rampage or three. The
same is true of San Andreas, although the allure of the '80s theme
usually won out before I got the San Andreas disc into the system.
Rockstar hasn't forgotten how to do this sort of thing. I liked visiting
the faux West of Red Dead Redemption just as much as I did Vice City,
and still load up the game to ride around the lonely prairie.
GTAV,
much like its immediate predecessor, GTAIV, is too almost-modern for
its own good. While the setting is ostensibly today, the plot goes back
to the 2008-2009 depths of the Great Recession. The story feels dated,
and not in the good way of Vice City and San Andreas, which were
intentionally retro. Instead of thinking, "Cool! That Exploder:
Evacuator Part II movie commercial perfectly sums up how dumb action
movies really were in 1986!" you're thinking, "Man, the developers
started writing this stuff a long time ago."
Look beyond the jokey stuff, and you discover an unrelentingly bleak, black-hearted look at humanity.
Not
that the economy is really a whole lot better today, of course. But
worries about the housing crisis, the implosion of Lehman Brothers, and
the bursting of the housing bubble in the US--all things that clearly
motivated a lot of the storyline in GTAV--are not exactly current. We've
moved on to new economic meltdowns, like the stateside debt ceiling
crisis. It's critique of mainstream media is equally archaic; taking
shots at reality television for being crass also isn't cutting-edge
comedy. Grand Theft Auto V was a clearly expensive game to make and
obviously took a long time to develop, but a story that is only
contemporary when work begins in earnest on a project of this magnitude
ultimately looks dated. It suffers from the curse of trying to be too
current.
The triumvirate of protagonists represents the before, after, and way after of humanity.Los
Santos, at least, is brilliantly realized, particularly as a technical
achievement. The city and the surrounding meth-producing rural environs
form the most realistic depiction of a metropolitan area to ever grace a
game. The whole burg lives and breathes, offering colorful slices of
life whether you're creeping through backyards in the dead of night or
just wandering down the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon. I don't
think I ever encountered any window dressing; all of the people seemed
to be present in their own moments, not just there to serve as my
personal backdrop. But it's so damn big. I long for the simpler layouts
of Vice City and even the more sprawling San Andreas. You could get to
know them in a reasonable amount of time, which added to that easy sense
of familiarity that turned them into real places in short order.
This
is the most personable GTA game, with a strong emphasis on the three
lead characters that delves into their psyches (and even into your own
psyche by the end of the storyline).
That isn't always a good thing,
especially when it comes to Trevor, who's probably the most
reprehensible dirtbag protagonist in the history of gaming, if not
everything. Still, I couldn't look away. Trevor's most malevolent lines
were also some of the most hilarious in the game. He forms a vital part
of the triumvirate of playable characters, which are a commentary on
life in 2008-era America. Trevor represents bottoming out, while
burned-out Michael is the guy who's got it all and is still up to his
neck in ennui (he's sort of Tommy Vercetti, 25 years later), and
up-and-coming Franklin is the man on the rise who's eager to do anything
to make the money needed to be regarded as a success in Los Santos. The
three are a before, after, and way after.
Scripted missions are the best part of GTAV, especially the multipart heists.The
script is brilliant, from the start with Franklin and his idiotic buddy
Lamar, through Michael's spoiled-brat family life, through Trevor's
meth-lab murders, through the multiple-choice endings. GTAV gets back to
the psychopathic comic strip best represented in the craziness of Tommy
Vercetti in Vice City, but with more plot points and tighter
characterizations to hold the story together. This game hates everyone
and everything, expressing an unrelentingly bleak, black-hearted look at
humanity, with even the few rays of sunlight bookended by atrocity.
Trevor shows mercy on occasion, though the biggest act of charity he
offers in the entire game comes right after introducing a guy to
creative uses for a car battery and a monkey wrench.
The appeal of exploring the map on your own has been diminished.
If
you have a dark sense of humor, there are more laugh-out-loud moments
here than in all of the previous GTA games combined. Being able to
switch between the members of this trio at will is a great mechanic that
accentuates the humor. Flipping over to see what Trevor is doing almost
always results in tuning in to pure insanity. My favorite such event
was dropping in on him just as he was looming over a bikini-clad girl on
Vespucci Beach, while wearing nothing but a filthy muscle shirt and
tighty whities, saying something about her licking his white bits. Such
moments are likely scripted, given how this Walter White moment led
directly into a mission opening where Trevor dropped his undies in front
of hapless Floyd, but it all seems organic when you're playing.
Missions
have also been laid out almost perfectly, with loads of options as to
how you play them, especially when it comes to the big multipart heists
that see you planning and executing jobs with the help of hired
operatives. Events get overly surreal at times, with the trio working
together to form something of a James Bond team adept at everything from
flying planes to scuba diving. Still, it's all incredibly captivating,
and the game does everything at least reasonably well. Flying and
landing planes, for instance, still aren't fully enjoyable tasks, but
they've come a long way since San Andreas.
Women have few roles to play in GTA V. Here's the most common.Unfortunately,
the appeal of exploring the map on your own has been diminished.
Attempts at free-form chaos inevitably had me switching back to the
scripted stories and missions, which yielded far more entertainment. The
only thing I enjoyed about exploring was stumbling upon random
occurrences, such as robberies, an apparent bus hijacking, and police
shootouts with other criminals. Yet even these great little touches
paled in comparison with the scripted missions, and core components of
the game design have been tweaked to raise the profile of scripted story
at the cost of the open-world concept that has powered previous GTAs.
You can still go gonzo in style, but it's not nearly as easy to explode
in a random manner when the mood strikes you.
One reason
the zaniness feels so limited is that the police are extraordinarily
good at what they do and extremely aggressive. They arrive on the scene
of even one- and two-star wanted level incidents almost immediately, and
a police chopper is quick to show up the moment you hit three stars.
Police boats roar up quickly if you try to take to the waves, and cops
shoot extremely well, to the point where they can tag you with bullets
from a good block away.
Basic patrol cars accelerate almost as well as
the average Pegassi Infernus, and their drivers are expert at cutting
you off and blocking you in. If you want to go on a satisfying tear, you
need to armor up, make sure you have loads of the best hardware that
Ammu-Nation carries, and have a zippy car nearby. Walking out of a
hospital in a bad mood and going berserk with cathartic anger generally
gets you wasted again in very short order.
It's
a lot more fun to escape the cops by slamming a car into a Pay 'n'
Spray booth at a hundred miles an hour than it is to cower in an alley
for five minutes while the police gradually give up their pursuit.
0 comentarii:
Post a Comment